Your bonus has come in and for a brief shining moment it feels like you've got money to burn.

We all know that investing that lump sum makes a lot of sense, but it’s easy to lose sight of that when you’re looking out the window at two inches of snow and still haven’t booked a holiday for the year.

This is where Click & Invest comes in. Our investment calculator makes it easier for you to visualise your long-term financial goals.

Your investment options

So you’ve made the commitment to invest. However, your immediate thought is if you invest your bonus, the stock market could suddenly nosedive – wiping out a chunk of your savings in the process.

The dips can be painful. Yet, waiting for the right moment to invest can hurt more than you think. The markets rise and fall but the long-term trend has been inexorably upwards. Putting your money to work earlier should provide a higher rate of return over time. Sitting on the sidelines could, in fact, be more harmful to your finances than jumping straight in.

The potential of investing is evident when using our Investment Calculator. If you were to invest £20,000 on our Click & Invest platform in favourable circumstances your investment could grow to £25,982 in just 12 months.

Of course it’s always worth remembering that investments can go up and down and you may lose some or all of your money but there is currently no instant-access savings account out there that can get close to that rate of return at the moment.

Tip-toeing into the market

One way of minimising your fear of the stock market’s roller-coaster moments is to make the fluctuations work in your favour.

By investing your bonus in instalments on a regular basis – tip-toeing into the market gradually – you can lessen the risk of investing a large amount at the wrong time. It means you will end up buying at more stages of the market cycle.

Our Investment Calculator again allows you to preview your potential returns by selecting the regular amounts that you could pay into your portfolio over time.

Record bonus season

UK workers received a record £46.4 billion in bonuses last year, according to the Office for National Statistics

So, if you are one of the lucky ones to be showered with a bonus, before you are tempted to go spending crazy it may be worth first checking the potential returns it could make with Click & Invest. It could ultimately be more gratifying than a bit of retail therapy.